Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort as we continue our celebration of Women's History Month.
This week, we’ll wrap up our look with a selection of fascinating SIU Press titles.
Melissa Ford’s A Brick and a Bible: Black Women’s Radical Activism in the Midwest during the Great Depression, winner of a 2023 Illinois State Historical Society Certificate of Excellence in “Books, Scholarly,” theorizes a tradition of Midwestern Black radicalism, a praxis-based ideology informed by but divergent from American Communism. Midwestern Black radicalism that contests interlocking systems of oppression directly relates the distinct racial, political, geographic, economic, and gendered characteristics that make up the American heartland. This volume illustrates how, at the risk of their careers, their reputations, and even their lives, African American working-class women in the Midwest used their position to shape a unique form of social activism.
We Are a College at War: Women Working for Victory in World War II, by Mary Weaks-Baxter, Christine Bruun and Catherine Forslund, weaves together the individual World War II experiences of students and faculty at the all-female Rockford College (now Rockford University) in Rockford, Illinois, to draw a broader picture of the role American women and college students played during this defining period in U.S. history. It uses the Rockford community’s letters, speeches, newspaper stories, and personal recollections to demonstrate how American women during the Second World War claimed the right to be everywhere—in factories and other traditionally male workplaces, and even on the front lines—and links their efforts to the rise of feminism and the fight for women’s rights in the 1960s and 1970s.
Sayre P. Sheldon chose to focus on the twentieth century for her collection Her War Story: Twentieth-Century Women Write About War because women's roles in war changed dramatically during that time period. The twentieth century redefined the meaning of combat and expanded the territory of war to include women in larger numbers than ever before. When the technological advances of modern war began to target civilians, the home front became the front line. Women took an active part in war whether or not by choice, often by moving into occupations previously closed to them. Women covered wars for their newspapers, wrote war propaganda for their governments, published their wartime diaries, described fighting alongside men, and used wartime experience for their fiction and poetry. Women writers also chose the right to imagine war, just as men for centuries had written about war without actually experiencing it.
In Vote & Voice: Women’s Organizations and Political Literacy, 1915-1930, Wendy B. Sharer explores the rhetorical and pedagogical practices through which two prominent post-suffrage organizations—the League of Women Voters and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom—challenged the conventions of male-dominated political discourse and trained women as powerful rhetors. Vote and Voice is the first book-length study to address the writing and speaking practices of members of women’s political organizations in the decade after the suffrage movement. During those years, women still did not have power within deliberative and administrative organs of politics, despite their recent enfranchisement. Because they were largely absent from diplomatic circles and political parties, post-suffrage women’s organizations developed rhetorical practices of public discourse to push for reform within traditional politics.
These titles and more on this week's edition of Inside The Blanket Fort.
